Home Movies

WE’VE all been tortured by someone else’s home movies—endless hours of driving from destination to destination, out of focus close-up shots of flowers and other wildlife, the shaky cam, the zoom in and out cam, boring and painstakingly bad piano recitals. You know what we’re talking about. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could make a home video that you and your family actually wanted to watch every once in a while, for old times’ sake? Producing a good home movie is difficult, in part because most people who don’t work with a camera for a living don’t know about the hard work—the planning and editing—that professionals do to make even a simple video entertaining and effective. The process of shooting home movies for most people generally involves turning the camera on and recording, with little attention to what and how it is being taped. But with some planning, you can avoid some of the pitfalls that lead to home movies that are more mind-numbing than the snow after a VHS movie ends. Even badly shot material from any event would be more enjoyable to watch compressed down to 30, 10, or even 5 minutes—instead of hours. Of course, compressing hours of footage down to something watchable is a time-consuming task that you may not get around to if, say, you have a full-time job. That’s why one of the keys to the successful home movie is to get less footage than you think you’ll need.
On the flip side, since you’re documenting real life as it happens, we realize it is sometimes difficult to decide what to shoot and when to turn off the camera. In this chapter, we’ll look into how you can start to make those sorts of decisions, along with some other ideas and techniques for getting the footage you need in a manner that will be reasonably easy to edit down to something interesting enough to garner rave feedback at family reunions and neighborhood barbecues (or film festivals, pool parties, or whatever it is that goes on in your particular neighborhood).